Life Without a Recipe Read online

  I feel a little hitch in my throat when he says this. Something I wish to ignore. He speaks as if meting out life’s facts. His ID card, clipped to the visor, says Majed Abouzayd, and a somber face that seems at once sixteen and sixty-two stares at us from the photograph. The upholstery in this car looks like someone tried to stab it to death: There are broken crank windows on both sides, shreds hanging from the ceiling, and a reek of toasted cumin and something else, ancient and terrible, in the air. I press my hands between my knees. “They’re so much work. And we’re—I don’t know. We’re just happy with things as they are.” I try to recall Scott’s usual arguments, but he opts out of the conversation, glued to the side window. I know he’s wondering, as he often does, about the way certain people in my family are drawn to intense conversations with strangers.

  Majed smiles in the mirror, his eyes narrowing into long, dark creases: “You just don’t know yet.”

  “No really, trust me. . . .” I’m trying to laugh as I sit forward to contradict him. But he raises two fingers, a flourish, and cuts in, saying, “You don’t know what happiness is.”

  A few weeks later, on a plush Miami night, we’re back at home, sitting outside. I wait as Scott tends the grill, like I watched my uncles when I was seven, waiting for the shish kabobs, breathing the lovely scent, the coal-hiss connected directly to hunger. There are bottles of beer with wedges of lime tucked in the necks and a tabbouleh salad with bits of parsley dark as jade. Just around this time, almost ten years ago, I touched a glass pane, looking across the Willamette River into another life. I knew something new was coming, yet I couldn’t have imagined this velvety late night, couldn’t have known I’d be sitting outside with a cutting board on my lap, a canopy of foxtail palms curving overhead. I rub halved garlic cloves over the toasted surfaces of sliced baguette and say to my husband, “There’s a question I’d like to explore . . . a little bit.” We look at each other, our expressions blurred in the dark. There’s no knowing what is possible, only the willingness to take the next step, blind, into midair.

  Maybe the first bits of parenting occur when you begin imagining your way into it. Or perhaps it’s when the sadness of not doing it begins to shiver inside your body. Maybe it’s different for everyone. I read that one of Julia Child’s greatest regrets was that she’d never had children. All that lovely cooking and eating, and no child to share it with. There it is, the grief of it, clanging.

  A therapist tells me with a laugh that her own daughter didn’t want kids and instead offered her “grand-doggies.” I can’t meet her eyes.

  My grandmother had been so dismissive of having children, and even so, baby pictures of me and my sisters lined her walls, black and white, the photography studio air filled with soap bubbles, our hands lifted.

  Several years after our wedding, after much dithering and debate, nothing is decided, but my body begins acting independently of my mind. I drag my reluctant husband to a famous fertility doctor. The Coral Gables waiting room is filled with pregnant women, husbands escorting wives belly-first through doorways. But the doctor doesn’t want forty-four-year-old eggs. He conducts his examination and pronounces me fit—as a vessel. “Great! We’ll give you hormonal injections, trick your body into thinking it’s pregnant, and select an egg donor.”

  “You mean—someone else’s baby?”

  His eyes flutter slightly. “Somebody else’s egg. DNA can come from your husband and half will come from—you know, elsewhere. We’ll dig up a donor who looks like you, talks like you, thinks like you. You’ll give birth to a gorgeous, healthy creature.”

  A band starts tightening across the center of my chest. “Well, but why go through all of that if it’s not really my own egg? I mean, he—” tipping my head toward Scott, “doesn’t even want a baby in the first place. I’m the only reason we’re here. If my—contribution—gets cut out—I don’t know. It’s like all that work—getting me impregnated—and the cost—it’s almost like it’d be beside the point.” At first, I think I’m disappointed, yet as I say this, I realize I’m hoping for a child, the experience of a family—not necessarily the biology of it. Molecular DNA doesn’t really enter into the picture.

  Still, the fertility deity looms over me with his long, Nordic face, this bringer of babies, his voice confiding, “You know what this is? You’re just afraid of being found out. As long as the parents don’t tell, they never have to find out.”

  Scott says, “Wait, wait—what?”

  The doctor’s smile cuts to my marrow. “Where they started. Their biological donors.”

  I sneak a glance at Scott.

  The doctor studies my expression, his smile icy. He’s a slick of white in his jacket and lemon hair. “Please—don’t be prudish. Wait till you see the work I can do! No one would ever suspect, least of all your child. . . .”

  I dress quickly, shoulders hunched, gooseflesh in the air-conditioning.

  We don’t schedule a return visit, leaving behind his office and his chilling voice. (“People do it all the time.”) The waiting room flickers behind us, TV monitors beaming ads for egg donors, sperm donors, IVF. An echo chamber, the sounds bouncing off the floors and ceilings. The idea of it—the singular insistence on a biological child, one body, one set of genes, one source—also like an echo chamber.

  Gradually, then all at once, this parental resolve begins to overtake me, the decision making itself. I surf the world of children: India, Thailand, China, Kazakhstan—multitudes of orphaned and impoverished kids in every country on earth. I sign up for newsletters and e-mail updates; chat with adoption counselors and foreign adoptees; collect fat packets in the mail—a mountain accumulating on the dining-room table; read blogs and letters, personal accounts from people embarking on journeys they’d never before imagined. Nigeria, Cambodia, Guatemala. It scrambles my sleep, this research; I dream of ice storms. I wake in the dark with an aching jaw, a sense of desolation: This really is a challenge for someone braver, more intrepid, and more organized than I. As I leaf through the materials, my worry mounts. I wake from dark-edged dreams: long corridors in which lights flicker on and off. My hopes shift from country to country—India, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Romania. So many contradictory labyrinthine rules!

  I spend months on research—which stretch into another year—unable to settle on a starting place. There are too many agencies and countries and lawyers. Then, moments of panic: Scott’s been right all along—I must not actually want this as much as I’d thought. The process starts to seem like a deliberate test of fortitude. The agency brochures piled in the center of the dining-room table are pushed to one side. For a dinner party, I must clear the table, so I ferry the stacks of folders—their images of radiant faces, tiny hands waving in the air—to the floor of my office; then, days later, scoot them into the corner of our bedroom. They nearly disappear, transforming into makeshift furniture, a place to stack books.

  Scott still hasn’t agreed to anything, but I notice he no longer sends me links to stories about Americans slowly going bankrupt in Cameroon hotel rooms, awaiting a child. He no longer writes, “There is no way.” It seems he doesn’t have to. I think he feels sorry for me. I’ve stopped calling agencies and reading brochures. After two years of discussion and searching, the children shining on the folders seem farther away, as if transmitted from another galaxy. One day, Scott notices I’m using some emptied adoption-agency folders to organize student papers. He hitches an arm around my shoulders. “Maybe . . .,” he says. “Don’t give up yet.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Moment

  Five o’clock on a Friday, late in spring, I’ve been studying adoption materials for at least a million years. The palm trees beyond my office window are stirring with mermaid light, evening coming, drifting in long blue wisps. I’m reading a blog written by two prospective parents who crossed the Russian steppes in a frigid car, searching for a child who may not actually exist. I stand up from the desk, gravitate toward the windows to watch nannies and office wo
rkers walking home. Listless, distracted. I can’t seem to get the process going. There are fingers of something like despair creeping in around my rib cage. I’m about to admit defeat.

  Good excuses are everywhere when you’re scared to do something. Pick them like berries off the bushes—too hard; too late; too expensive. Anything but admit it’s inside of yourself: you’re too scared. I accuse myself of weakness, wonder if that’s why I started to write. Because I was too scared to stand up at the table and say it out loud—whatever was hiding in my thoughts. I chose fiction, that protective cloak of imagination, so if anyone I knew ever got angry, I could deny everything, insist I made it all up.

  Facing the window, I experience a sort of pause. I’m not sure what to call it. Perhaps it’s a vision or mirage floated somehow from the gray dwindling light. I imagine setting the table with two round white plates and one small plate decorated with a lamb. I see the plates clearly, though there’s nothing like that in our kitchen. Something whispers to me, Try, try. A breath in the vertebrae. For a moment, my grandmother Grace, gone more than ten years, is frowning at me from the window’s dark glass, just as though she’s standing patiently behind me; I see magenta lipstick, pale brows. I blink, look hard at the image, then swivel to face an empty room. An us’meh, as Bud would say. Omen. One of destiny’s private moments.

  All right, Grace. One last call then—a gesture before surrender. The agency materials had tapered off in the mail several months earlier, but I’d received a straggler that day. Already covered by a stack of student papers, the brochure was just a sheaf of stapled pages, a logo of paper-doll cutouts. I slide it out and dial the number on the inside page, certain the office will be closed this late in the day. After the fifth ring, a young voice answers; she asks whether I’m interested in domestic or overseas adoption.

  Startled, I hesitate. “Overseas,” I blurt. Then add, “I guess.”

  “You guess.” Her voice curves, a hint of humor. “Been researching foreign procedures for a while?”

  “Mostly I’ve been giving up.”

  “Uh-hunh.” She sounds sympathetic but unsurprised. She asks, “Ever considered domestic?”

  “Well, but. . . .” No one’s suggested this before. I glance at the window. The neighboring houses are now black silhouettes, ink spots. A red bird stands on the bougainvillea outside my window and tweaks its feathers like it wants to be combed. Bird and I stare at each other. “We’re weird—as parents go. I don’t know how many birth mothers would pick me.”

  There’s a restless bit of silence between us and then the woman begins to explain things to me, her voice calm as a pond. As I listen, I become aware, for the first time in a long while, of feeling myself relax; the space between my ribs increases. There are all kinds of parents, she says, and so many children, right here, all around, who need parents and homes.

  “Every adoption is its own thing.” Her fine, light voice continues. “Just like every childbirth is different. And each family.”

  After we hang up, I tip back in my office chair, teetering, considering. Outside, the red bird turns sideways to get a better eyeful. I look back at the phone. It’s like discovering the gap in the hedge to a secret garden: Step through the ivy and there it is, the path laid out, one slate stone after another, right in front of your fool self.

  Two weeks later, we drive to Sarasota, where a citywide book club is discussing my novel about a woman with foster parents, someone who believed she had been rescued by apes in the rain forest. I’d awakened one day with the character in my head, dictating her story to me. That morning, I was up in bed with a notebook and pen, transcribing, inhabited by her half-lost voice, a kind of misty howl. For months, I felt unlike myself as I wrote, unpersoned and altered by an alien tropical landscape. Before a podium at the public library, I talk about the writing life, confess to the audience that I was raised to consider telling the truth distasteful, even reckless. I tell them the process of becoming a writer has been a long, hard form of private combat—the struggle to become a truth-teller, to find the private places where there is clarity and energy, and to hand it over to readers. I hear murmurs of recognition. A young woman asks if I have children; when I say no, she nods significantly, as though jotting mental notes.

  Afterward, Scott and I explore the city streets and eventually come across the big aquarium. It’s filled with children running through hallways. They shout at each other and drop candy wrappers and stream around us in twisting currents. Scott raises his eyebrows at me: I pretend not to notice. They shout at the displays of exotic fish and rap on the shark tank. “Hey, fish!” Eventually, we come to a quiet spot: windows filled with coral and jellyfish, the space shadowy as a bower. All around, the tanks have slanting lights, the room is dotted with low, bedroomy sounds. The seahorse tank looks dim and satiny and filled with activity. Minuscule creatures bob to and fro in the water, stretching their question-mark bodies and equine profiles; they swoop together, fly apart, filigreed movement.

  The exhibit sign says a seahorse is one of the rare creatures in which the male of the species carries developing embryos in a pouch and gives birth. This particular group had recently spawned, the tank alive with seahorse babies, filaments weaving through the water, entwining each other in baroque patterns. We stand together, watching, and the world quiets down. Seahorses. It’s liberating in its otherworldly quality, like a promise from another dimension.

  Back at the bed-and-breakfast, we open the door and there’s a china plate of truffles on the bedspread. Rolled in cocoa powder, the truffles have cunning, pinched-off tops. The inn’s proprietor, who’d spent the morning talking to me about food writing, had slipped in afterward. There’s also a card: “Welcome to the family!” I hold the plate on my lap and eat three truffles in a row, vaguely bewitched, crossed by a memory of seahorses. Our room is lined with uncovered windows, so it feels as if we’re in an enclosed porch, green light bouncing in from the lawn. The room is all-afternoon sunshine, bending green and blue from the waves of the Gulf of Mexico, barely twenty yards from our room. Down to one truffle, plate on my lap, I hear myself saying, “I mean, I can’t keep on not-knowing. Are we doing this or not?” I hadn’t realized I was going to say it, but then I know I’d had to. Is he in this moment too, with me?

  His hand had curled around mine as we’d watched the seahorses curling together. We’d observed them, silently, for a long time.

  The light in the room turns liquid, suspended and pale. And, quietly, he says, “All right.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Talking to God

  Mother’s Day. Creamy cloths on the tables, classical music. Wired with prerevelation nerves, Scott and I sit at the restaurant table: For weeks we’ve wanted to tell my parents about our plans to adopt, but we’ve held back. Scott, who frequently has clearer glimpses into my parents than I do, says we’d better make sure we’re ready to let go of the far side of the pool. I know what he means. It can be a bad idea to reveal too much to my father: With the slightest inspiration, he will erupt into assumptions and advice. And at this point, we’ve kept the secret of our deliberations for so long, it’s hard to know how to begin. Sometimes it seems as if the story resists its own telling—some silences harden in place, some things so tamped down we forget how to say them. Scott and I talked it over carefully on the drive to Pompano Beach—how we’d open the conversation, how we’d put it, after so many child-free years: Well guys, you’re never going to believe this but. . . .

  The restaurant itself is scary: There’s a server at one’s elbow, seemingly at every moment. They fidget over the silverware, snap open napkins and settle them in our laps, refill the water glasses to a hairbreadth of the brims. My husband and I wait for a moment of privacy, looking at each other behind the waiters’ backs. We squeeze each other’s hands, tap toes under the table, about to begin, when another man in a tuxedo emerges with a tray of cutlery. Eventually, there’s a break just after the black jackets clear away our amuse-bouche and before th
ey bring the consommé. But then I start breathing like a landed trout, too anxious to say a word. I wonder if we will just have to raise our child in total secrecy. To my terror and relief, I hear Scott clear his throat lightly and say, “Hey, so we’ve got some news!”

  He looks at me. I manage, “We’ve decided. . . .” We interlace our fingers. “We’re going to adopt a baby.”

  My parents freeze, spotlit, their silhouettes painted onto the folding curtains behind them. Bud grabs the table, looks from me to Scott back to me again, a big, open-mouthed, not-quite-smile on his face. “You are . . . now, what are you doing?”

  “A baby?” Mom puts her hand on Bud’s.

  “We talked about it and talked about it and we finally decided to go for it,” Scott says gently. “We want to start a family.”

  “Can you believe it?” I ask brightly, trying to penetrate the layers of shocked silence.

  A man in a black jacket appears and begins rearranging all the utensils on the table. “The consommé will be arriving at any moment,” he informs us.

  Bud’s hands move to the top of his head, then, very slowly, he lowers his forehead all the way to the tabletop. I’ve never seen him do that before. The waiter backs away. “Dad? You okay there?”

  Mom says quietly, gingerly, “Well, I think. I think it’s wonderful. I think a baby is a very, very good thing.”

  Dad lifts his head a bit, looks from me to Mom back to me again. “I’m happy? I don’t know. Am I happy? How do I feel? I can’t tell.” He slowly returns to an upright position.

  Mom faces Dad and says in a fresh, assured way, “It’s wonderful. Incredible. A baby—it’s a miracle. You’re happy, Gus.”